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All Rise...

The Charge

"Aw, I'm just kidding—don't get mad, baby!"

The Case

The host of BET's Comic View, Bruce Bruce is a large and in-charge
sort of fellow. His canon includes being very well dressed (for a gigantic man),
making lots of jokes about foreplay, penises, his two-faced mother, smoking
cigarettes, and lots and lots of audience heckling (especially over their
fashion sense.)

"Wow—I ain't never seen a muscle shirt with slack in
it!"

At the risk of spoiling the plot for people, here is a synopsis of
Platinum Comedy Series: Bruce Bruce. The camera shows the comedian for a
minute telling joke. Cut to shot of crowd laughing. Cut to shot of comedian
grinning broadly. Cut to shot of crane shot flying over crowd. Repeat.

Sound familiar? A long time ago, somebody decided this was how all stand-up
comic movies should be, and ever since, this is how they have been. You score
bonus points when the shots of audience members laughing and clapping seem
completely out of sync with the chuckle track.

Not surprisingly, a lot of sentences start with, "White people
___!" and, "Black people ___!," where the blanks represent
whatever particular joke is being told. Some of them are funny, and some of them
are not.

But, to his credit, he saves the best for last, and ends on one of the
better stand-up jokes I've ever seen a comic do.

Pardon me; not "jokes." He doesn't tell jokes. He tells real-life
stories, and makes them funny. (His words, not mine.) And this makes
sense—his style is very casual, very flippant, and very verbose.

He has the skill of a practiced comedian where every thing that he says has
the casual air of witty, spontaneous banter, even when the lines are rehearsed
and practiced. I don't know anybody who can spin a serious yarn about 9/11 and
the World Trade Center disaster, and then go seamlessly into black people having
bad credit; but dang if he doesn't pull it off with immaculate style and
panache.

Bruce Bruce also offers numerous tips about relationships, some of which are
so profoundly striking and accurate, I wrote them down. The guy comes across
like a big, crazy uncle, who simultaneously intimidates you and makes you
laugh.

From a technical standpoint, the disc is what it is. The audio is on par
with what you would expect from a 50-minute stand-up comedy disc. Likewise, with
the video—the disc is full screen and the colors are not spectacular, but
neither are they disappointing. The audio, likewise, is a very neutral and plain
mix. No extras to speak of, no features, just a really big comic on stage, doing
his thang.

The worst feature of the disc, ironically, has nothing to do with the
technical presentation, or the comedic content. A two-minute DVD ad at the
beginning of the disc appears, and amazingly, it cannot be fast-forwarded,
jogged, shuttled, skipped over, or interrupted in any way. FBI warnings are
irritating enough, but this is especially aggravating, for two reasons. First,
even the most obnoxious FBI warning never lasts two full minutes; and second,
FBI warnings usually don't have Snoop Dogg in them.

Bruce Bruce is fairly endearing, but he's not really my cup of tea. Granted,
I suffer from, how shall we say, a serious demographic deficiency—but even
so, other comics in the genre, say, Cedric the Entertainer, D.L. Hughley; heck,
even Bernie Mac has a funnier show. But at a show where the audience is drinking
shots of booze by the fistful, I'd be laughing pretty hard too.

Still, all in all, not a bad disc, especially if you are a fan of the man
and his material. If you have no idea who Bruce Bruce is, well…come to
think of it, I can't think of a reason for you to even be glancing at the DVD in
a store, in that case (though it does have a very pretty and striking pink
cover.)